


till all our strivings cease

by vegarin



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Substance Abuse, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:27:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27321178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vegarin/pseuds/vegarin
Summary: The world ends. And somehow, it gets worse from there.
Relationships: Frank Castle/Matt Murdock, Jessica Jones & Matt Murdock
Comments: 9
Kudos: 46
Collections: Fratt Week





	till all our strivings cease

**Author's Note:**

> Last summer, I promised I'd do my best to contribute to Fratt Week, but there just hasn't been enough time this past month to sit down and finish the story I had planned, so this one was cobbled together instead. This isn't quite the full story I envisioned, either, but I hope it's better than nothing. 
> 
> So, here's to titC! Thanks for patiently organizing all these events for the fandom! ☺

* * *

Two of their scouts, barely teenagers, come back with the news at dusk. The fence near the southwest gate is down, and a few stragglers have made it through before they could patch it.

Unsurprisingly, Frank is already getting up from his well-worn chair and collecting his gear, even before the kids are scrambling to finish their report. After the kids return to their posts, Frank lingers at the doorway and turns to Matt, like an afterthought. "I've got this."

Matt thinks, for maybe half a breath, that he should consider stopping him. But he can feel the way Frank's been slowly crawling out of his own skin, his restlessness vibrating just underneath. Frank has been benched for over a week, stuck at the shelter to nurse his injuries from his last run while radiating poorly concealed displeasure at anyone foolhardy enough to remain within proximity. Namely, Matt.

"Ask Sarah to take a look at your wrist before you go," Matt says, a meager compromise. Before Frank can argue otherwise, he adds, "I can hear bones grinding. Leave it, and you might risk your shooting hand."

It's an exaggeration, and they both know it, but Frank, predictably, grunts instead of answering.

"Unless you want me to bench you again," Matt offers, almost pleasantly, and traces the map on the table with his fingertips before marking a spot with a jagged clip.

"You can try," Frank says, gruff and low, but the sounds of his steps are heading toward the aid station that Sarah has set up next to the kitchen in the back, so Matt relaxes a little in his seat, steadying his fingers over the map again.

 _Southwest gate._ _Stragglers._ And two weeks ago it was the raiders from the road up north. And a week before that was a swarm of stragglers. They would need to reinforce the fences again or build in a more regular watch routine to make sure every corner is covered. The makeshift fences surrounding the shelter are just that, makeshift, and he can't always be listening out for troubles.

He hears Melanie's footsteps before she enters the room. "Matt," she says, and there's exhaustion steeped in her soft voice, the weariness that he's been hearing more from everyone's voice in the shelter. "The pump's stuck again."

Weariness is tangible and infectious, and he fights against it with everything he's got. "I'll be right down," he tells her, struggling to form a reassuring smile.

And, like a minor miracle, he succeeds; her heart slows and calms, with a smudge of hope stubbornly clinging to her heartbeats, and Matt suddenly wishes he could remain oblivious to this, to this seemingly blind display of the belief that he could make their lives better.

Just as he wishes to remain blind to the feel the cross, lopsided and silent, hanging precariously above them.

* * *

Outside their shelter, the evening sky hangs low.

Frank navigates the smoldering amber and walks over the black ash on charred remains of roads laid out between crumbling buildings. He breathes the chill in the air and trudges through the scorched earth, hearing nothing but his own careful footsteps and seeing only suggestions of life long dead.

Along his path, he comes across a pair of bodies, heads busted like ripe watermelons and faces mangled and gangrene. He watches, rooted, as gleaming beaks of crows peck at dead flesh and reveal skulls underneath. Their shapes match two hungry blackbirds, reading a will to the dead men.

He takes a step, cutting into the tableau, and the birds squawk and fly away.

The world is nothing but a grave.

For a moment, Frank wishes for skin so thick that nothing could cut into it.

* * *

Matt can gauge the amount of vodka Jessica has been able to find by the mood she's in when she returns at the end of the day. Today she's not repelling everyone with her scowl, so Matt can already tell that some of the bottles in the hefty bags that she dumps at his feet will quickly disappear with her when she escapes to the roof before the night is over.

He's sorting through her scavenged goods when she tosses something that feels like a book at him. He catches it in mid-air.

"How did you find this?" he asks, swallowing a sudden lump in his throat. His fingers remain frozen over familiar words in Braille.

She shrugs with her shoulders, assuming Matt would pick up on the gesture. "Got lucky," she says, though it doesn't take his abilities to tell that she's lying, that she must have looked for it hard and long.

He should say that she shouldn't have wasted the time, that it's already enough of a hard work for her to find supplies for their twenty-odd survivors every day. Yet his mouth wouldn't open to form the words. He knows Thurgood Marshall's words by heart, but it's something else to find their shapes underneath his fingertips, to be able to feel them, physical and solid. "Thanks," he tells her. Means it.

"Don't mention it." She drags a creaky wooden chair across the floor and slumps over it. "Seriously, don't."

He knows she can't sit down just yet and hates it, this knowing and needing to say: "The pump's broken."

She doesn't groan, not quite. "Again?"

"A pipe broke underground. I couldn't lift the boulders to fix it."

For a moment, she doesn't move, her heartbeats slow and uneven. Then she springs up, cracking her bones. "Alright, then. Lead the way."

They head downstairs and weave through the corridors with rooms where most of their group are sheltered. Melanie and Sammy meet them near the pump further down at the basement. Matt listens for the sounds of water and pipes once again, fingers splayed over the concrete. "Here," he says.

Jessica punches and shovels and grunts, all without a single complaint, and by the time she straightens the pipes back into the right place again, more people in the shelter have made their way downstairs to watch and help. There are low murmurs of relief and sighs, and Melanie hugs her son tightly.

Jessica accepts their thanks, awkwardly and with the usual lack of grace, but doesn't immediately storm off and hide with a bottle of whatever alcohol she can get her hands on, like she used to before. And Matt—

And he's just glad that he can't see the grateful faces around them.

* * *

Frank returns and finds Matt at his usual spot, sitting by the desk in the dark and leaning against a small window wrapped in the plastic tarp covering broken glass. The yellow and orange glow of the setting sun streams through the lattice of cracks on the ceiling and hits the shattered wooden cross just above what used to be an altar, leaving an elongated shadow over the darkened floors and over Matt.

Frank has to force himself out from the moment, from pausing to take in the view that seems as transient as a work of stained glass that used to cover the windows of this place. He stalks over to his chair at the corner across from Matt's and drops his gears. "Three stragglers, all down," he reports—likely unnecessary, since Matt would've already gleaned the answer from the way Frank smells or the way his heart beats, or something along that oblique line skewing all logic and sense.

"Good," Matt says anyway, reaching out for the map marked with thin ridges and pins. Frank has already figured that Matt doesn't really need maps or markings. The details of the shelter's parameters and the records of previous intrusions are already neatly catalogued and indexed in that lawyer brain of his, ready to be retrieved and utilized at will, but he seems to find odd bits of comfort in being tactile—one of the few new things Frank had a cause to learn about the Devil of Hell's Kitchen since the world had abruptly and ruthlessly decided to end on them.

Matt's fingers trail to a stop, and his head tilts in a familiar manner. "Peter?" he calls out.

A dark-haired boy, who couldn't be more than ten, peeks out from behind the door. He's holding two bowls in his hands. "Mom said to bring these up for you."

Matt thanks the boy in his eminently kind voice and hands one of the bowls to Frank. Matt's smile at the boy is schooled and smoothed, almost by rote. The kid flushes, mumbling a quick _you're welcome_.

On his way out, Peter stops by Frank's feet, fidgets for a moment, and then blurts out, "Is it true what they say?"

Frank digs into the bowl, which turns out to contain some sort of chicken soup. "What do they say," he says, only because the boy stays behind for a long moment, not taking silence as a hint.

"That you're the Punisher?" the boy asks, eyed wide and bright.

"Yes, he is," says Matt, still patient and kind, when Frank doesn't answer for a long moment.

The boy beams at Frank, awed and a little cowered, and dashes out of the room. Frank can tell, without looking up, that something suspiciously like a real smile is flickering at the corner of Matt's lips. A smile that only broadens at Frank's annoyed grunt.

That smile fades a little when Frank says, "Figured out where the raider base is. One of them was still holed up in the convenience store ten blocks down."

Once, there might have been questions—no, _demands_ —to know exactly what kind of methods Frank employed to extract that piece of information, but no such questions are forthcoming. It's almost odd, Frank thinks, how that now feels a little like loss.

These days, Matt only ever looks tired. To be fair, Frank's no better.

"We need you here, Frank," Matt says, and his voice is almost even.

We. A few of the survivors they have managed to cobble together. All currently huddled below, clinging together in what used to be a church basement. They, all of them, make a sad little group, but that's still a _we_. This interminable _we_ that couldn't be abandoned or left behind.

"You've got Jones," Frank still argues, hanging onto that thin thread just for the sake of it. "And this'd be a permanent solution to our nagging raider problem."

"Would be permanent enough if you get yourself killed."

Frank flashes him a smile—sharp-edged and wide enough to have sent many hapless thugs that found Frank in dark alleys scrambling to run away, but its effect is currently wasted on its impassive recipient. "Oh, ye of little faith."

"If only faith could solve all our problems," says Matt, and there isn't even anger where it should be. He lifts his eyes as if to meet Frank's. His eyes land somewhere behind Frank's shoulder instead.

Those red-tinted glasses Red used to wear were one of the first to go among the things that ended along with the world. Frank doesn't miss a lot of things, but he thinks he might miss them. The glasses. And the mask. Without them, it's too easy to see into those eyes, to read much more than he's ever thought he'd wish to know.

"You need sleep," Frank says, going back to his bowl of soup. Matt's bowl remains conspicuously untouched.

"You first," says Matt.

* * *

When Jessica returns to the shelter and climbs onto the roof, she finds Matt in her favorite chair.

She's just drunk enough to contemplate shoving him off the chair but not enough to actually do it, because he looks settled for once, his precious book unfolded over his lap and eyes closed. If she doesn't know any better, it would've been easy enough to assume he's asleep. He doesn't really sleep, not since that one time when he fell asleep and missed sensing a few stragglers that broke through the east gate and reached the church basement.

She remembers Foggy Nelson telling her once, while they were celebrating one of their wins in a dive bar somewhere— _you know, back at Columbia, I thought Matt could practically recite every word ever uttered by Thurgood Marshall, I swear to God, every single word, so crazy stubborn_ —and suddenly the image of Nelson drunkenly laughing and shaking his head before this, _before all of this_ , burns so brightly behind her eyelids that she has to squeeze her eyes shut, hard, before she can blink it away.

"Fuck it," she mutters, sliding onto another broken plastic lawn chair next to Matt's and kicking over an empty can at her feet.

"Tell me," Matt says, a long moment later, wrapped in the kind of tiredness that always seems to envelop him.

She squints her eyes a little to stare at the twilight blanketing the sky. "It's blackish purple, like a bruise."

At times, for no particular rhyme or reason, Matt asks her what the sky looks like. The descriptions she comes up with are never cheerful, but he asks and listens quietly, as if her words still count, somehow.

She throws a pebble over the roof, and it lands somewhere on the ground, into the soil that no longer grows anything living.

"I'd always thought," says Matt, absently, "that I would go down fighting."

She doesn't say: the sky is the color of dark circles under your eyes, and the shade of the bruise on my cheek. She doesn't ask: what the fuck do you _think_ we're doing here, if not going down fighting?

"I didn't," Jessica says instead. "I always thought I'd live 'til the ripe old age, like a fine bottle of vodka."

"You can still," says Matt. "You'd have to stop drinking so much first."

"Nag, nag, nag."

That gets her a smile that's maybe halfway there. She can still cajole it out of him, from time to time. It's a gift.

To self-congratulate, she takes a mouthful of terribly sweet bourbon—beggars can't be choosers—and thinks about nothing at all.

* * *

The most of the larger break-ins play out just about the same, and this one is no different.

Jessica flattens a swarm of stragglers by leveling a wall on them, and Frank picks off the leftovers one by one, methodically and with precision, while covering their back. Matt senses one that's about escape the fray; the rock he throws smashes clean through the skull that seems to be made of ash and mist, spewing a thin squirt of liquid at the impact. He's been reliably informed that they look like shadows made of translucent, half-digested sooty grey Jell-O, even though they're solid enough to be punched and shot at. He would have to take their words for it. He can tell from his own senses that it smells just about close enough.

At some point Frank has apparently decided to reserve his ammo, because he joins Matt and Jess on the ground, swinging the butt of his rifle and smashing the heads of the stragglers like they're abnormally large baseballs. Soon enough, there's a neat circle of bodies around them, already starting to turn into thin mists and dissipating into the ether.

No strategy or even finesse ever seems to be required to repel swarms this size. It's worse, sometimes, that there's not enough of a struggle in the fight, this struggle to continue to live. Every move now is by rote, going through the motions because they can't afford not to. And because there's no other option left.

"Any more of the fuckers?" asks Jessica, catching her breath with arms braced over her knees.

Matt listens and shakes his head. "That was the last."

Frank, next to him, isn't even out of breath, seemingly overeager for more heads to bash and butcher. At least there's less of that listlessness thrumming under his skin, some of the bloodlust waning from the fight. For that, at least, Matt is thankful.

"Feel better now?" Matt asks, only a little accusingly.

Frank lowers the rifle. "Fuck, yes."

"Good," Matt says, firmly, "because you're taking the next watch over the area."

Matt can't see Frank roll his eyes, but still knows that's what Frank does as he picks up his gear and heads toward his little makeshift sniper's nest at the fallen building overlooking the fences.

Matt considers the idea of reinforcing the southern wall again, but there seems to be no point when the stragglers can hop over it just as well as any determined human would. Still, it wouldn't hurt to have some additional deterrence. He would have to add the scouts to this area tomorrow. He rubs his eyes.

"Stop thinking," snaps Jess, irritation sharpening her voice. "Take your own damned advice for once and get some sleep."

"What she said," says Frank, his voice echoing from farther away.

This time, Matt does roll his eyes.

* * *

This time the scouts come back with a young girl and her grandfather, who have come all the way to the southwest gate on foot. They used to live in Queens, and somehow they weren't wiped out by the first wave. It was a miracle, says the grandfather.

What followed after, less so.

Frank oils his guns meticulously until they're gleaming and spotless and then watches from his seat as Matt talks softly to the newcomers, calms them down with his reassuring words and gets Melanie and Jason to help them settle in one of the bunker rooms. There are lines that seem to grow on Matt's face, that seem to etch ever more deeply, just from this single interaction alone.

Peter and his mom have brought more soups. Matt's bowl still remains untouched.

"There's a talk," Frank says when they're alone, already knowing how this would unfold, a tedious denouement to a predicted end. "On the radio."

"There's always a talk," says Matt, sharply. Predictably.

And it's true. There's always a talk. Of the last stand. Of saving the world again. Of hope. Less and less as time goes on, but there's at least still that, a talk.

And _yet_ , thinks Frank. "They could use you there."

"We're needed here."

"Exactly how long do you think we can be nickel and diming this?"

"Frank," Matt says, and his hand whitens around the edge of the desk he's gripping. "We're done talking about this."

The words lack the heat that they once would've held. Red is no longer red, as if he can't manage to muster the anger he used to bottle up inside him, as if he's forgetting the way he used to let the fire burn him, bright and scarring.

It's fitting, somehow. The world as they've always known ended. No reason that one thing that Frank thought he knew would remain the same when nothing else has.

* * *

Jessica is patching the wall in the kitchen with Matt when Sarah, the only one here some medical experience, comes by and asks Matt for help. Matt dutifully goes over and stands by her new patient, that newcomer with a granddaughter, and then tips his head and listens to whatever it is that only he can hear. Jessica watches the way Sarah turns pale at whatever Matt tells her afterward.

"What," Jess asks him when he returns to her side and picks up a brick.

Without a word or an expression, Matt plasters the next section.

" _What_ ," she demands again, insistent and sharp.

"His heart," Matt says, barely a murmur, when she stares at him hard and long enough. "I heard it, and it's not—it's not something we can fix. Not with what we have. And even if we had a fully functioning hospital, the result would be the same."

 _Shit,_ she thinks, and runs a hand down her face, before squaring her shoulders and picking up another brick. "Well, we knew we couldn't fight our way out of everything." The case in point, the state of the world.

There isn't much left in the world that Jessica doesn't hate, but this might just take the cake. But then again maybe this is the best they could hope for, she thinks, dying of old age instead of building broken bunkers and clinging to the hope that they could outlast the remnants of the magic that left Earth burnt crisp, and with the added bonus of fighting endlessly against some dusty fuckers that the ground conjures up for kicks.

"The good people are gone," Matt says, sounding far away, and she wonders if he even knows he's speaking out loud. "And here, we—we remain. Still."

They remain because that's what they do, and because they're survivors. But that's not how Matt Murdock's brain works. "The world's ended because shit happens, Murdock," she tells him, feeling for the verbal claws and putting them to good use. "It wasn't some fucking Rapture. Get with the program already."

"And that is what, exactly? This program of yours?"

She can nearly hear the familiar 'alleged' there somewhere, in the snappish and exasperated voice that sounds more like Matt Murdock from the pre-end times, for once. It almost makes her want to grin. Almost. "Practicing not giving a shit. You should try it sometimes. Does wonders for your soul."

"Maybe I will," Matt says, likely just to rile her up.

"Right." She snorts, without even meaning to, at how unconvincing _that_ sounds. " _That_ will be the day of the Rapture."

Once the giant hole in the kitchen is properly walled and plastered, it almost looks like there's never been a hole in the first place. Matt returns to help Sarah with the dying man, and Jessica takes a mouthful of a drink and stares at the wall until her vision turns blurry at the edges.

She's a survivor, she knows. If nothing else. Even if all else fails. She's still that.

It's just, she hasn't known that she'd still be around and kicking when she couldn't defend anything at all.

When there's really nothing left any more to defend.

* * *

"Easy," Frank says, putting a light hand on Matt's chest.

Matt startles, jerking awake in the sleeping bag. For a moment, he looks more than a little wild and impossibly young, unseeing eyes darting around before settling finally somewhere around Frank's shoulder.

"Easy," Frank says again, quieter. "Just me. Nothing's out there."

Matt always sleeps uneasily, and never for long, and Frank thinks it may have been kinder to leave him to it, instead of bringing him back to the wakefulness just so he could tightly wind himself up once again. But Matt runs a hand down his face just once, hard, before pulling himself up and leaning against the wall next to Frank, having apparently dispelled whichever nightmare that has haunted his sleep with that single gesture.

It feels wrong. Forced. But hardly anything ever feels right these days, and Frank can't find the line now, if it ever has been there in the first place.

"What happened?" asks Frank, if only to feel for that line that's supposed to be there.

He doesn't think Matt would answer, at first. "Amy's grandfather passed away today," says Matt. His voice betrays nothing. "Aneurism. There wasn't much we could do. I wanted to—I stayed with him."

"Why?" asks Frank, because if there wasn't much they could do—

"Because Amy is too young," Matt says, his voice even. "Because no one wants to die alone."

He looks rumpled, Frank thinks, like all his good bits have been already squandered away, and—

And there might just be a limit to how long Frank can go on, how long he can stand by and watch a well-meaning man losing himself by dents and bits. He clenches his jaw and tries to push the thought out of him, but it remains, a solid weight pressed against his chest.

"That thing can kill you, you know," Matt says, pressing his arm across his eyes.

It takes a little while for Frank to figure out that Matt means the cigarette dangling between his fingers.

There's a smile buried in there somewhere and he might find it, if he digs around long enough. An old joke, now down to a routine.

Frank takes another drag before snuffing it out with his fingertips. "Well, shit. Suppose we all gotta die once."

For no reason at all, this gets Matt cracking up with barely suppressed laughter, teetering on the thin edge of hysteria, and he doesn't stop laughing for some time.

This time, Frank lets him.

* * *

"Wonderin' where's your god in all of this."

Frank said that once, after the world ended and they found out that this time around there was going to be no take-back, no impossibly powerful and powerfully impossible jewels set on some galactic glove to return the dead and revert everything back to normal. Normal, whatever it meant.

Matt was in the middle of quietly bleeding out on the floor, but he could still hear Frank, who was somewhere in the back, between the collapsing wall and the broken pillars that had him pinned. Frank smelled like blood and sweat—and the cigar, flickering precariously between his trembling fingers. Matt was in no shape to talk, so at least he didn't have to postulate exactly where God would be in this moment. He only breathed.

Or tried to, anyway. The pain was already pale and distant, just as the memories of many losses and deaths, fading along the edges of grief and madness.

"Would've been nice to have one in our corner," said Frank, offhanded and careless, as if he wasn't suffering from broken ribs and hemorrhaging everywhere, "if these alien gods and magical beings that decide to wipe out a planet on a whim weren't be-all and end-all."

Matt was hard-pressed to disagree with that sentiment. For a long moment, he listened to the sound of the dead world and thought about normal, whatever that meant.

Normal, when Earth was no longer just ash and dust. Normal, when powers-that-be could bring life back just as magically and suddenly as they had destroyed it. Normal, when suicidal, last-ditch efforts by superheroes and every man and woman actually succeeded.

Normal, when Matt thought he could hear God with them, in every struggle, in every step of their way, if he only listened.

There was another sound, then. Movement. Steps over gravel and ashes, making their way closer. And a shape that felt oddly familiar.

"You look like shit," Jessica said, standing over Frank.

"Likewise," said Frank. Oddly conversational for them, Matt thought faintly, but maybe this was what happened when the world ended and everyone you've ever loved was dead.

She was cradling a broken arm, but she took one look at Frank and pushed over the pillars pinning him in place. Frank slowly dragged himself up to a sitting position, still bleeding out sluggishly. Jessica made a half-hearted attempt to help him, which Frank waved off.

Jessica must have seen Matt, then, because she said, abruptly, "Is he—?"

She didn't finish the question, and the silence seemed deafening. "I don't know," Frank croaked out, and brought the cigar to his lips again.

The fear permeating in those words felt so sharply like grief that Matt had to force himself to breathe out, with all his remaining effort. "Still here."

His voice was thin, reedy, and didn't sound like his own, but he heard the two sets of heartbeats jolt and eventually calm, in an improbable chorus.

"You fucker," Jessica spat out, making it sound like a relieved sigh, and slid down next to Frank, who ran a hand down his face. A moment later, from her jacket pocket emerged a bottle of liquor, something that felt strong enough to burn Matt's throat just by the smell of it, still amazingly intact after everything.

"Thought about quitting once," she said, shaking the bottle in her grip.

Frank snorted a laugh that turned into a long, hacking cough. "Well, shit, don't let this stop you."

"Are you fucking kidding? I'm doubling the fuck down, starting now."

"Go right ahead," said Frank, when the cough eventually subsided. "Not like there's anyone else around to judge."

"No," said Matt, and he thought— _normal_ , when you could hear God, if you only listened. If only— "No one else. Just us."

For a long moment, they breathed dust and cement.

"Fuck," said Jessica, eloquent enough for all of them.

Frank held onto his cigar long after it turned to ashes. Jessica drank until the bottle emptied. Matt breathed. They waited, in each other's silent company, for death that didn't come.

Sometimes Matt thinks they're still frozen in that moment, and all of the rest that has followed after is just a long sad echo of that unending nightmare.

* * *

"There's a talk," says Frank, from the doorway.

"There's always a talk," counters Matt, because the two can play at that game.

Matt keeps his focus on the map spread out on the desk in front of him, face carefully neutral, but he can hear Frank closing the door behind him. Dropping his gear at his chair. And watching him from across the room, with the same intensity and deliberation that Matt knows he pays to the targets at the end of his scope.

Frank smells of ash and dust and gun oil. He smells like another bad day of endless fights against the stragglers.

"Even among those super-powered," says Frank, "your abilities would be useful."

Matt is entirely too tired for this conversation, but no, Frank isn't going to take kindly to silence as an answer. He never does. "Speak for yourself, Frank."

"Me? No. I'm just another warm body that likes to pull the trigger," Frank concedes, seemingly not even a little grudging. "But you—you and Jones—you two just might even make some difference."

"People need us here." And Frank knows it perfectly well, because, at the heart of it all, it's always the same damned argument, which Matt can automatically repeat from the memory. "You know the logistics. The group can't make that trip. Not even with the three of us to protect them. That's even assuming that safe zone really does exist. Here, at least, we have a chance."

Here, at least, they could survive. Matt knows he's parroting Jessica, but she's never really been wrong, not with this.

"Surviving ain't living," says Frank, almost patiently, even pityingly, as if it's Matt that's the unreasonable one here.

"Because somehow _you_ know the difference?" And suddenly this is enough to make Matt lose composure and raise his voice, as it always is the case when things involve one Frank Castle. "How, while you're doing just about everything possible to get yourself killed?"

There's a sudden flare of anger, bright and wild and familiar, and Matt whirls around on Frank.

"Tell me this, then. If your wife and children were still alive and here with us, would you still want me gone?" Matt asks, knowing full well the line he shouldn't cross is already several breaths behind him and yet feeling dangerously reckless enough not to stop. "How would you want them to die? Here, unprotected because some of us are off elsewhere pretending to save the world and failing? Or while on the road to some hypothetical safety?"

Frank is utterly still, belying the ferocious rage that makes Matt recall one moment from that night on the roof, right before he'd fully expected the Punisher to shoot him in the face.

"And Peter?" Matt pushes, because that's how momentum works, unthinking and heedless. "How much of a chance would you like to give him in their stead? Just about half? Or none at all?"

It's a low blow. Matt knows it even as he says the words, and he isn't surprised when that gets Frank moving. He doesn't even try to sidestep the blow that comes, mostly because he figures he might've had it coming.

When he crashes against his desk and ends up on the floor, Matt absently wipes the blood off from his face and wonders how he could've ever forgotten, even briefly, that Frank Castle coming after you feels just about as pleasant and avoidable as a battering ram intent to punch a hole through your face.

"And you?" Frank asks, pulling him up with his hand on Matt's elbow and shoving until he has Matt backed up against the wall. "If Nelson and Karen were still in this world, what would you do to save it?"

Matt wrenches away from Frank's grip, but Frank's arms land squarely against his chest and next to his head, the feel of his anger almost tangible from where they're touching.

"Tell me, Red," says Frank, shaking him once, "how much farther would _you_ go?"

The air feels heavy, thick with sweat and blood. Frank still smells like cigarettes and gun oil, and suddenly Matt feels faint, dizzy with something that almost feels like want. He finds himself swaying on his feet.

Frank's hand on his chest is still there to right him, the other hand tangled in Matt's hair. And then his mouth, on Matt's.

"Fuck," Frank says, after. He hits the wall behind Matt with his fist, once. And again. Matt stands still, feeling his gaze on him like it has weight, until Frank turns on his heels and leaves.

Matt still stands, remains behind, conscious and without thinking.

His fingers, restless and lost, find his map on the desk, torn into pieces.

* * *

She doesn't care to bring these things up, mostly because she really couldn't be bothered to give two shits, but at some point even she reaches the point where it gets too difficult not to notice how Castle is being even more of a dick than usual.

"Okay, what the fuck is the matter with him now?" asks Jessica, flatly, when Castle puts on a disappearing act immediately after dispatching a swarm.

A ghost of a smile flits across Matt's face. "How long do you have?"

Not that she doesn't get his point—it would be insanely faster to list what _isn't_ the matter with Frank Castle rather than _is_ —but that's not what she's asking and he fucking knows it, so she lets her annoyance fully show on her face.

Even though he can't see her expression, it works out about the same. With a wince, Matt ducks his head and runs a hand through his hair—now long enough to fall across his eyes and effectively hide them. "He thinks I—you and me—can do more good elsewhere."

It's possible that this is the dumbest thing she's ever heard, and she's heard a lot in her day. "Where the fuck is this mythical elsewhere where we can do this supposed good?"

"With the Avengers," Matt clarifies.

"Oh, _fuck_ the Avengers," says Jessica, with _feelings_. 

For the first time in a long time, there's a genuine smile on Matt's face, one that might even reach his eyes. "Succinct as always, Jessica Jones." 

"Exactly what does he think any of us could do against inter-dimensional alien beings of magic that can blip out our entire reality in a fucking blink and conjure monsters out of air and dirt? We can do fuck-all, is what."

The last she's heard, whatever was left of the Avengers were out there somewhere looking for Stephen Strange who was lost in time or travelling dimensions of realities or some creatively cracked and exceptionally stupid shit like that, because of _course_ they would. Before that, they were looking for some sort of quantum time travel method to rewind time, before the multiverses decided to collide and tear a hole through Earth. And before that, an Asgardian relic that could undo all the damages ever wrought on Midgard.

And so on. And so forth. In the same vain.

Matt's silent for a moment. "He might not be wrong, not entirely," he says eventually, rubbing his forehead. "They could probably use you. Even me."

She takes one look at his sorry face and suddenly she gets it. "Oh, Jesus effing Christ. That's not really it, is it. Because it can't be the Punisher of all people suddenly believing the fucking Avengers can fix this clusterfuck if only we could somehow help." She turns around in circle, and once again just for the emphasis, and spreads her arms wide. "Seriously? _Seriously?_ You two couldn't just get this over with—whatever the fuck this is—and just had to make it into a thing now?"

"It's not—" Matt wipes his face absently. "It's not like that."

"Right, of course it isn't." She doesn't try to hold back the snort, but he sounds tired and small and she can't even be properly angry. "Christ, just—deal with this, all right? Fight him or fuck him and get it out of your system, or better yet, get it out of _his_ , and make him stop throwing _hissy fits_ like a teenage boy with a crush on some prom queen."

"Jess, I—" he starts, but even he doesn't look like he knows what he's meant to say, whether he should be crying or laughing. "Did you just compare me to a prom queen?"

Men. The world's fucking ended, but the joke must be on her, because she's still dealing with this shit. "Please just do me a big giant favour and do it somewhere where I can't see," she says, turning away before he starts to say even dumber things. "Not enough liquor left in the entire fucking island of Manhattan for this."

* * *

Matt runs his hands over the map that still remains in pieces. He doesn't have the heart or desire to fix it, but it feels too neat like a metaphor, and too much like a failure, not to attempt repair.

He drags a chair over to the desk and starts the seemingly impossible task of putting everything back together when Peter comes around, peeking from behind the door along with Amy.

"Matt? You said you're looking for Mr. Castle?"

"Yes," Matt answers, turning around and putting on a small smile, "have you seen him today?"

Peter nods, and then catches himself before saying out loud, "Yeah, um, Amy says she saw him leave the base a little while ago."

"Said he's got some things to take care of," adds Amy, shy and hesitant.

Matt thanks them for their help. It doesn't take a moment for him to realize, belatedly, that the most of Frank's gears are gone from the shelter, even the extra ammos that he's been keeping in the storage.

There's been a moment, one precarious moment, just after Frank's kissed him, when he could have said—

He tries to imagine blank spaces where Frank used to be. When all the vestige of normal, such as it stands, is ripped away once again.

 _This, you, is all I have left to hold onto,_ Matt hasn't said.

The cross still hangs above him, above them, unsteady and futile.

Even when he strains to listen, still, there's only silence.

* * *

The end nears, as it does, almost unexpectedly but not quite. Another tedious denouement, Frank thinks, to a predicted end.

His head hasn't been in the game. An amateur mistake, but that's how it goes, how one quickly ends up becoming a target practice in an enemy territory that you weren't fully expecting to engage in.

One batch, two batch.

He takes a few of the raiders down, at least, before he falls to his knees, the breath in his chest expanding and his vision swimming.

Penny and dime.

He thinks, _I should've said—_

_Should've said—what? What?_

There's no answer.

Wildly, he feels something like a hole in his chest and wonders where the souls go. Maybe he should've asked Red, before. He's sorrier than he's thought he ought to be.

No one wants to die alone, was it?

The sun sets overhead, bringing hazy amber glow, and casts a long, welcoming shadow.

And along with it, a couple of furious faces.

* * *

"You asshole," says Jessica, and punches Castle in the face, the very moment he wakes up.

Castle, to his credit, seems to be aware when he deserves to be punched in the face, because he doesn't actually dodge, or maybe he can't, what with coming perilously close to being permanently riddled with numerous bullet holes. He doesn't look too hot, even after Sarah patched him back together, so maybe it's a good thing that Jessica pulls her punch at the last possible minute against her best instincts.

It really doesn't help her mood that she's aching everywhere from bodily hauling his ass out of the raider base while Matt was busy distracting with the idiots with guns.

"When I told you to _deal with it_ ," she tells Matt pointedly, "I didn't mean—make him even more psychotic and suicidal than usual."

"I didn't know what he'd planned," says Matt, wrapping his arms around his chest. He's sitting next to the cot where Castle is laid out, sporting just about the same number of bruises she does and looking even more miserable, if it was even possible.

She glares at Matt, hoping that would make her feelings known on the subject, but Matt does look more wrecked than usual, and she isn't entirely unsympathetic. "That enough for you?" Jessica asks Matt, crossing her arms. "I can hit him again, if you want, but I'm not giving him a shovel talk."

That gets her a small grin, but even a hint of it disappears when he turns to Castle. "You're a bastard, you know that?"

Somehow, something that might be within a shouting distance of a smile flickers and dies on Castle's face. "Surprisingly, it hasn't exactly escaped my notice."

"Do something like this ever again, and I'm telling Jess not to pull her punch."

Castle reaches up to feel for his jaw, seemingly almost amused by it. "Have mercy."

"No."

"Red—"

"Maybe we all die once, but not like this, not _ever_ , you hear me?" Matt says, furious, and his head falls to his chest. His hands on the edge of the bed are pale with strain. "How far do you think I'd go to save the world with you in it? How far are you going to make me go?"

Castle looks—stunned, she thinks. Bruised, and shattered, maybe. And not just from her punch he took.

"Not enough vodka in the world," Jessica mutters to herself and goes off to find herself a drink.

* * *


End file.
